“Better than in the halls,” confirmed Faltar, his mouth nearly full.
“Yes,” mumbled Cerryl, finding himself nearly ravenous.
They ate silently and quickly.
Cerryl had to lick his fingers clean, and they still felt sticky.
“I’m going to look around.” Faltar inclined his head and then slipped toward a green-and-blue cart-or the slender girl holding up a woven basket.
The younger mage smiled to himself and turned the other way, passing a cart filled with long yellow gourds and thin green ones. He paused after several vegetable carts at another kind of cart painted gold and silver. Three blades lay on a display board covered with blue velvet. One was short and dark-and he could feel the chill of ordered iron. The second was of fired white bronze, like a white lancer’s sabre, although it wasn’t. The third was a huge iron broadsword, one that Cerryl doubted he could have lifted, with a wound-copper hilt.
“You like the sabre? For you, a mere gold,” insisted the pallid man by the cart, limping forward from where he had been talking to a darker swarthy fellow.
“No. . no thank, you.” Cerryl smiled and stepped back.
“As you wish, ser.”
He could sense the anger and disapproval and turned. “I’m not a weapons mage.” He wasn’t sure there were any weapons mages, but the blades felt wrong for him.
The man bowed, almost as if puzzled.
Cerryl nodded and passed to the next cart, where colored scarves were wound loosely around polished wooden pegs on a display board and fluttered in a breeze that barely ruffled his hair.
“Scarves of silksheen, real silksheen from Naclos.”
Cerryl had never heard of anything from Naclos, and he reached to touch a silver scarf. As his fingers touched the fabric, smoother than anything he had ever felt, the color darkened almost into gray. He let go of the edge of the scarf and watched as it flashed silver.
“Only two silvers for you, young ser. Just two silvers.”
Two silvers for a scarf barely a cubit and a half long and half that in width? Two silvers? Cerryl smiled politely and stepped away.
The sound of the first bells of late afternoon echoed up the avenue and across the square. The vendor at the next cart began to unroll the canvas to cover the cart bed and the three baskets of potatoes that remained.
“Best we head back.” Faltar appeared at Cerryl’s elbow.
“Did you find anything?”
“No. One pretty girl, but not that pretty.”
“That wasn’t what I meant.” Cerryl turned toward the Halls of the Mages.
“Oh. . things? What would I do with anything except books? Derka would only ask me what value it had.”
“We can’t hold property, can we?”
“No. Didn’t Jeslek tell you that?”
“Not in so many words. He never says anything directly.”
“Derka doesn’t much, either.”
“I wonder why.”
“We’re supposed to figure it out, and if we can’t, well, then. .” Faltar left the sentence unfinished.
Cerryl knew well enough what the other meant-all too well.
LIV
CERRYL SAT AT the table, looking blankly at the slate and the wedge of chalk beside it. The whole room smelled of chalk, unlike any of the other mages’ chambers he had been inside.
Standing at the other side of the ancient table was the heavyset Esaak, wearing flowing white robes of the older style, rather than the white tunic and trousers used by Sterol and Jeslek and all of the younger mages.
“Master scholar Cerryl. . might I have your attention?” Esaak’s jowls wobbled as he spoke, and his voice rumbled.
“Ser?”
“Have you read any of the book I left for you? Naturale Mathematicks, it is called, if you do not remember.”
“Only a few pages, ser.”
“Why not more, might I ask? Is the ancient and honored study of mathematicks beneath you?” Esaak half-turned, walking a few paces across the dusty floor.
“No, ser. I fear I am beneath it.”
“Such refreshing honesty.” The older mage’s words dripped irony. “You seek to disarm me with false modesty.” He coughed several times, with a rumbling deeper than even his bass voice.
Cerryl felt tongue-tied, feeling he was off on the wrong foot.
“Well?”
“No, ser. I can read and write, but my education has been limited to history mostly. The honored Jeslek has insisted that I read all of Colors of White and complete a large map within a short period of time. I have to do some anatomie drawings for the mage Broka. I read the first section of the Mathematicks, but much of it was so unfamiliar. .”
“Tell me what you thought you read. .”
Cerryl wanted to sigh.
“Go on. What was the first section about? Surely, surely, you can tell me what the words said?”
Why did all the mages ask questions rather than tell anything? It seemed to Cerryl almost as though he were being asked to teach them. He moistened his lips. “Ser. . the very beginning I understood. That was about the history of reckoning, where the first use of numbers were words like ‘yoke’ and ‘pair’ or ‘couple’-two things because we have two hands. Then, as people gathered more goods or crops, or lived in larger settlements, larger numbers were needed, and they came up with terms to count larger groups of things, like ‘score’ and ‘stone’. .”
“What is similar about the two?”
Cerryl looked as blank as he felt.
“They’re each a pair multiplied by ten,” snapped Esaak. “A stone is a pair of fists ten times over. A score is a couple of hunters ten times over. Go on.”
“Then the book started talking about something called partition enumeration. .”
“And when it got a little difficult. . you stopped reading?”
“No, ser. I kept reading. I understood the idea of dividing groups of things into groups of the same size and using symbols to represent larger numbers, like ten score, but when it started on how to scrive such numbers, and that you had to have a symbol for nothing. .”
“Why shouldn’t there be a number for nothing? Isn’t not having something as important to know as having something?”
That wasn’t exactly what Cerryl had meant. At least, it wasn’t what he thought he’d meant. “It is, ser. I meant. .”
“What did you mean? Mathematicks is precision, not vague statements about a few stone or score. How would you like it if a lancer scout told you that the force you faced was a bunch of scores of armsmen?”
“I’d want to know more.”
“And you should.” Esaak gave an even louder and more dramatic sigh, readjusting his robes as he did. “You know. . you’re all alike. All of you seem to think that what we teach you is because we owe you something.
“Oh. . the days, the years I have spent pounding and prying knowledge into empty-ordered heads. For what? So that you can go off and dash your brains out against some evil-hearted order magician from the black isle? So you can overload a ship and sink it in the sight of rough water?” Esaak exhaled noisily.
Cerryl waited, not knowing what to say, or even if he should attempt to say a word.
“You all can see the value of even learning to fire-scrub sewers, or to memorize every bone in the body the better to destroy it, or to make maps for the day when you will direct lancers in battle. . But what is behind it all? Mathematicks! Calculations! Numbers!”
Cerryl felt like slinking out by the time Esaak was through, although the older mage had said enough-eventually-that Cerryl could grasp the idea of a symbol of nothing as a place holder for calculations. It made sense, but, like too many things, no one had ever explained it.
There was one question that Esaak had raised and not really answered-what did all the mages do besides make life difficult for student mages? If Jeslek happened to be any example, they didn’t spend all that much time with students, just enough to set them on projects and complain about the results. They came and went, and so did many carriages and wagons, and Cerryl had overheard talk about various rulers, and soldiers, and even sewers. Jeslek had talked about governing but said that it wasn’t ruling but guiding, without ever defining what he meant.